Forgotten Places
by The Black Sun's Daughter
Summary: Oubliette. It was French for "forgotten place." Exactly right. A forgotten place for forgotten things.


It is always cold down here. And dark. And wet, too, a slick damp of condensation stuck to the walls and the floor. He's been down here 46 days; he knows because they left him his watch. His trousers and his vest, too. And his gloves. But not anything else. His shoes, socks, belt, shirts, waistcoat, and hoodie have all been taken. Not that he could use them for anything, not down here. Down here it is only him and his thoughts. Crying for help did nothing; there is nobody to hear him. He screamed his throat raw the first three days. He's still waiting for an answer. He doesn't speak anymore. There's no point. He vaguely remembers a time when it was said that he couldn't shut up to save his life. Well, he's shut up now.

He pushes one hand back through his hair, making a slight face at the unwashed feel. He'd give anything for a bath. A proper bath, too, in a great tub of water so hot it'll scald. But there is no tub down here. His prison is 4.49 metres in diametre; he worked out the rough measurement on the first day and the exact measurement the third day. It is 4.49 at its widest, but it is not 4.49 metres all the way around, as it is not perfectly circular. Slightly oval, really. There is a drain: a wee round hole only two inches in diametre to let the water out when it rains. The walls are rough, uneven stone and stretch up and up and up, higher than he could ever climb, so far up that he cannot even see where it ends, if it ends at all. There is no light, and he has become used to being blind. He is not alone down here, either. Not entirely. The floor is covered with bones. Bones from dozens of different skeletons, flesh all rotted away, scrambled together like so many pieces of a puzzle thrown about in a box. He's found twelve skulls. He keeps them lined up beside the little patch of stone floor he's cleared away to sleep on. There are more than twelve bodies, though. He wonders what happened to the missing skulls, if they crumbled away into dust with the years or were perhaps taken.

He wonders if he's going mad. Probably.

* * *

It's been 87 days since he's seen the sun or felt the wind or tasted clean air. The air down here is musty and dank, full of the scent of death and old rot. 87 days of not seeing another living soul. He's fed scraps of food - bread crusts and chicken bones with only bare scraps still clinging to them - from somewhere above. He eats every bit of what he's given, even cracking open the bones to suck out the marrow. The rest of the bones he pushes down the drain; the only bones allowed here are human ones. He knows that.

He never saw who took him, he doesn't remember being left down here, but he still knows who is responsible, who locked him in the dark and the cold. What he gets to eat changes almost every day. Sometimes there is no bread but there is a hard rind of old cheese. Sometimes there are no chicken bones, but there are scraps of beef fat. But every day, without fail, there is an apple, sliced neatly down to the core by a knife.

He gets water when it rains, which is every other day if not every day. It rains constantly, though he cannot hear it or see it. He is merely aware of it, because the rain causes water to drip down into his prison, trickling from above, dripping down the walls. He speaks for the first time in 84 days to ask the skulls if they mind, then uses one of them as a cup to hold the water in. It works better than his hands or the scapula he had been using. The skull doesn't mind, it told him so. He knows that he's going mad, but that's okay. At least he isn't alone, not with the bones there to whisper at him.

His favourite is called Billy.

* * *

More than once he's considered killing himself. There's a bone, a femur that was broken cleanly in two, probably from a long fall. They probably tried to climb the walls and fell. The result, though, is that the femoral head was broken off into a long, pointed splinter of bone, perhaps a foot in length, with one long, thick, deadly sharp point. He's tested it with his fingertips; it draws blood with only a little pressure. He knows anatomy intimately. Human anatomy, he's a little fuzzy on, but he knows where his major arteries and veins are. The easiest would be his jugular and carotid. The bone is long enough that if he gets the angle right and stabs hard enough, he'll cut one or the other if not both. So close to his brain, he would pass out before he bled out, so it wouldn't be so bad, merely going to sleep and never waking up. Then he would be dead and his bones would join those of his dearly departed friends. Perhaps someday someone else would be thrown away down here and would find his skull alongside theirs.

It has been 159 days, and he's weighing the femur in his hand, tracing his fingers along the prickly crown where the bone broke, following the sharp spear with a fingertip. It is dark, endlessly dark, but he is used to the darkness now. He likes it, even, the cool, peaceful serenity of it, away from light and colour and sound, so obnoxious and preoccupying. He traces the edge of the femur.

It would be very easy to kill himself now. He's so thin it wouldn't be at all difficult to puncture his flesh and get all the way through his neck. And then it would be peaceful darkness forevermore. He traces the edge of the femur.

His free hand lowers to rest on the faintly-ridged cranial dome of Billy's skull. Lightly, he drums his fingers atop the skull, enjoying the hollow noise it makes his empty brain cavity. _Is this your femur, Billy?_ he wonders mutely. _Did you try to climb to freedom and fall back into the darkness? Or did you kill yourself with it, too?_

Billy doesn't answer him. He traces the edge of the femur.

* * *

It's been 204 days, and he still hasn't used the femur yet. He has taken to sleeping with it, though, one hand wrapped snug around it whilst the other rests lightly on his skulls, tracing their features with drowsy fingertips. He knows each one of them by touch, can feel across the ridges and divots of bone and know them like a blind man knows Braille. He sleeps now more than anything, down here in the oubliette. He remembers the word for his prison now. Oubliette. It was French for "forgotten place." Exactly right. A forgotten place for forgotten things.

Forgotten things, that is all they are. Him, Billy, all his other skeletal friends. Sad, broken little toys, thrown away into the dark to be left behind, tainted by the darkness, a stain that will never come out again. Blood does not come out of silk. Shattered glass cannot be made whole again. He was a mirror. Once he had been solid and whole and real, but no longer. Now she has broken him, has shattered his wholeness. All his pieces might be put back in the frame again, but there are cracks in his reflection that will never be healed.

He is quite mad now, and he knows it.

It doesn't bother him as much as it should.

* * *

391 days, and everything changes. Not in a good way either.

His darkness is ended. Not with a fizzle but with a bang. He was curled up on the cool stone floor, enjoying the feel of fresh rainwater trickling across his bare flesh, with Billy nestled in the crook of his elbow so the water can drip on his bones as well. It is only polite to share, after all. Then he hears it. A low, grating noise from somewhere far above, something that makes his skin crawl because it is not familiar, it is not what is supposed to happen.

He grabs the femur bone, holds Billy close to him, and waits, uncertain yet ready, tensed and waiting for something to happen.

There is a grinding crack, deafening in the quiet, the breaking of his world, and just like that, his darkness is ended. Light spills in, blinding, scalding, blistering light and heat and sound.

He screams.

* * *

458 days after he is put into the darkness, he is ready to leave it again. She has given him a task, one that he is most willing to complete, because she took Billy from him. She will return him once the task is finished. He keeps his femur bone, even though she has knives and guns of every size and shape. He likes his bones. They are his, his friends and companions, whispering secrets of their deaths to him, and he would not use some cold, dispassionate piece of metal when he had something much better. He carefully breaks off some of the splinters and smooths out the rough bits until it is just as sleek and sharp and deadly as any knife. He is almost certain that the femur belongs to Celeste, another of his skulls. He can tell by her muscle attachments that she was very athletic, her bones are very strong. She would have been one to try and climb out.

The place he has to return to is dimly familiar, though now it is too bright and too loud. He makes his way through corridors, flitting from shadow to shadow, hugging the darkness that he knows so intimately, trusting it to keep him safe and sheltered from prying eyes. He has to rescue Billy from her.

He slips into the office first, weaving past the twisting silver lines that make sense only to the man sitting at the desk. He walks up behind the office chair, reaches around with one arm, and plunges the femur into the man's throat, cutting his jugular and windpipe at the same time. The look of shock on the man's face is almost comical, blue eyes wide, mouth open soundlessly, gurgling faintly as blood floods his windpipe, drowning his lungs. He dies on the floor, a grisly halo of blood spreading around his head, sticking in his fair hair.

He moves quickly after that, knowing that once they discover the first body, it will be far more difficult to complete his task, and he must rescue Billy and the others. The next is a man as well, sitting in a room full of guns and knives, much like the one she has. He drives the bone into this man's kidney, twisting sharply and sending him into immediate shock; just to be certain, though, he slashes open the man's thigh, severing his femoral artery.

The first woman, he doesn't find. She finds him instead, walking down the corridor. Her eyes go wide, and her mouth opens, but he claps a hand over her mouth before she can speak, dragging her into the broom cupboard and cutting her throat just as he had with the first man. He leaves her there choking and gasping her last futile breaths.

The third man is in his own office, and this one is particularly tricky, as the wall is glass and visible to all. He waits, waits until the man steps out for coffee, then slides under the man's desk, waits for him to return, then severs his femoral artery.

The final bit of his task is down in a large section of the building meant just for animals, where it smells of hay and animal musk, and he can follow her scent to where she sits, feeding a mammoth apples. He slips up behind her and wraps arms around her, lets her see his face, pale and thin and spattered with blood. Her eyes are wide and full of tears, and her lips form his name, a name he has not heard in so long it no longer seems real. He kisses her, warm and soft, tasting of life and vitality and light and colour, everything he's used to missing. The sharp, smooth-polished bone glides through her flesh with barest resistance as if she is gossamer, up beneath her ribs into her heart. Her blood is warm, and it drenches him, the warmest he's been in 459 days.

His task is done, and when he returns, the woman returns Billy to him without a scratch. He stands with his body soaked in blood, Billy in one hand and Celeste's femur in the other, slick with blood. He speaks for the first time in 376 days.

"Can I have their skulls, too?"


End file.
